You obviously can get some level of compatibility with 5v shields if you add enough hardware, but one question might be "Is it worth it?" and from the look of the board they showed at the Faire I'd say they haven't accommodated 5v although you can't see the bottom of the board in the photo. Maybe it's time to bite the 3.3-volt bullet.

OTOH there are about 500 existing shields, pity to dump them. As to how many of those shields are useful that's a different story and I'm not about to trawl through shieldlist.org to find out. Some may in fact work at 3v3 but I assume many (most?) won't. But then an analogue MUX or GPIO expansion shield probably would. Depending on what chips have been used they could work at both voltages. So there may actually be a lot that do work or that could easily be modified by swapping chips.

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It will take some time before due will be a platform I can use.

I guess it depends on what you want to do with it. If your passion is writing drivers and porting libraries you can start right away

One would assume that all the core libraries are working at release time, it's the 3rd-party stuff that will lag.

there may not even be a bullet to bite, the 32 bit AVR's like the 32 bit PIC's have 5 volt tolerant digital inputs, and on one of my PIC32 boards theres little 1206 SMD pads to add pullup resistors to a 5 volt rail. I use 5 volt devices with it all the time, and heck, if I am not making a big deal about it, its not exactly rocket surgery

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Oh nevermind its not using an 32 bit avr, that would make too much since

It's kind of strange to jump into this discussion as my first post but oh well here goes...

I remember the first time I wrote a for loop with pwm control and was able to dictate to a fan exactly how fast to turnand when to speed up or slow down...

I'v never bought a 'shield' actually scratch that, I bought an Ethernet 'shield' and ended up never using it as my firstforay into arduino-dom was with a Teensy and Teensy++ which strictly speaking are not "arduino compatible".

For the fan I used a transistor mediated MOSFET circuit, ah the misery of circuit design, may it fade away :-)

5v? 3.3v? 1.8v?

Some of this strikes me as slightly superficial, I mean personally I want to learn more about electronics, and evenmake my own sensors, this use of modules (which is what shields really are anyway) is great for certain things like ethernet orbluetooth stacks, but beyond that, I really look forward to using the arduino hardware to help me learn more about electroniccircuits. I like hooking up transistors and using analogWrite() to modulate the power to them in order to understand how theychange in response under different voltage and current settings.

The arduino is like a semi-automated "independant variable" which we in the novice rungs of electronics so often need when troubleshootingcircuits. Before using micro-controllers the best I could hope for when creating a sweep signal was an oscillating 555 which required knowledge ofcapacitor to transistor dynamics which I did not have and am still building up.

I have a strange feeling that the 'shield' moniker is not an accidental nomenclature, I have a suspicion that the very word is rife with meaning as itapplies to electronics... Here is a piece of equipment that will 'shield' the user from the details of the electronic circuit. If I'm wrong then I would liketo know why that particular word was used. I like the term "breakout board" or "module", but in the end frankly I don't care about the "compatibility issue"because my aim personally is to learn how to convert signals from 5v to 3.3v to 1.8v and back again, and the arduino environment gives me just enoughinsulation from the horribly unforgiving world of embedded systems so that I still want to explore circuit dynamics.

I think the compatibility issue is more of a concern for those people who view the arduino platform and it's add-ons the way PC and Mac users view their ownplatforms. Speaking for my own interests though, I like] the fact that I'm exploring the world of ADCs and DACs and at least asking the questions necessary to understand how to interface a hardware ADC to an arduino, I like the details, it's exciting, and empowering.

My predominant hope with the Due is speed, sheer speed of calculation and a ton of inputs and outputs, I tend to like sensors, LOTS of sensors.

Applications?

I want to play with laser-range finding, no not using a 'shield', but I actually want to get messy with the diode assemblies and phototransistor arrays.

At the end of the day I don't view the arduino as an 'end' in and of itself like some sort of product to be QC'd to satisfaction...

I view it as a stepping stone into the world of electronics, and a "back door" way of accessing the kinds of knowledge and technology that heretofore would have required years of study at an engineering school. I don't mind the years of "self-study", but the electronics portion of the gauntlet is justtoo hard, and also too basic to be fun... I mean 555's and transistors? That's like living life at the amoeba level, while trying to evolve towards a fourlegged mammal... The arduino makes this dip into the austere, spartan, mind numbingly boring world of electronic components... bearable, and dareI say even 'fun'...

I have a feeling that the limitations I face are mostly knowledge-based limitations. i.e. That the right algorithms coupled with the right signal conditioning would enable some really cool applications even with the current crop of atmel MCUs, to say nothing of the Maple...Mmmmm.

Raspberry Pi? Talk about a confluence of technologies sounding like a breakfast spread. I see the Raspberry Pi as an awesome secondary processingnode for the primary sensor data acquirable with the lower level MCUs...

Something involving cars... and a "radar-like" capability in 360 degrees Hmmmm, yeah I have a lot of learning to do.

I remember the first time I wrote a for loop with pwm control and was able to dictate to a fan exactly how fast to turnand when to speed up or slow down...

There's something great about controlling physical devices, I like programming fancy GUIs as well but you don't get get the same thrill as watching a mechanical device move because your code told it to.

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ah the misery of circuit design, may it fade away :-)

For me the hardware design is one of the best parts, but not the building and debugging. I hate that.

For people making their own shields/hardware the 3v3/5v thing doesn't matter much, it's just the 500 existing shields that may be orphaned. But then it's probably fair to say that the Due is for more advanced users, the mainstream will still be the smaller 5v Arduinos.

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the 'shield' moniker is not an accidental nomenclature, I have a suspicion that the very word is rife with meaning as itapplies to electronics...Here is a piece of equipment that will 'shield' the user from the details of the electronic circuit.

Who knows. Personally I think it's just a stupid name to match the stupid shape. All done to appeal to artists. That said "shield" is a lot easier to say than "mezzanine board" or "daughter board".

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My predominant hope with the Due is speed, sheer speed of calculation and a ton of inputs and outputs, I tend to like sensors, LOTS of sensors.

OTOH there are about 500 existing shields, pity to dump them. As to how many of those shields are useful that's a different story and I'm not about to trawl through shieldlist.org to find out. Some may in fact work at 3v3 but I assume many (most?) won't.

I think it is a great pity that the designers didn't take this as an opportunity to dump the broken shield pin placement on the 8 bit arduinos and start with a clean sheet of paper for the 32 bit devices.

But dumping the 8 bit shield design for the 32 bit devices is not the same as dumping the existing shields. It's not as if there won't continue to be a demand and a significant "ecosystem" for the 8 bit design arduinos and their derivatives. Even if Arduino never manufactured another 8 bit Uno or Mega2560 board, I doubt very much whether it would be the the end of the 8 bit Arduino "standard". The 8 bit boards (well, clones and derivatives at least) and their 5V shields with their trademark broken header layout design would continue for the forseeable future -- at least while AVR 8 bit microcontrollers are still readily available at cheap prices.

But I must assume that the Due will retain the broken header layout, for the sake of "compatibility" (even though it is likely that almost no 8 bit shields will be compatible!) And so what we will see is a new generation of shields designed to run on the 32 bit boards (some of which may be designed to be also backwards compatible with 8 bit boards, but I suspect most shield designers won't bother -- they'll just continue to offer a 8 bit version and a new 32 bit version.)

Finally, not everyone is necessarily going to want to use a Due when a (presumably cheaper) Uno or clone will do the job. For many, perhaps even most Arduino-type applications, the power (and the additional complexity) of the Due will be overkill. And a "dumbed-down" ARM board that is functionally no more than a faster 8 bit AVR board, with more memory (i.e., not exploiting advanced hardware features like DMA, etc.) will make it an even harder sell.

But everything I've read suggests that's exactly what we will be getting -- an ARM board sadly crippled at birth by misguided notions of backwards compatibility with the 8 bit boards.

I hope I'm wrong. I like 8 bit AVR microcontrollers. I like 32 bit ARM microcontrollers. I am not sure I am going to like the Due.

I think the "dumbed down" part of it is a plus, I've never had experience with arm boards before and it would give me the chance to play around with it a bit then look deeper and learn how it does itif arduino didn't exist I wouldn't probably be doing much microcontroller stuff as its a really steep learning curve to learn straight c and all the specific machine commands stuff especially with no proper education on the matternow I understand most of it but only because I learned the dumbed down version first

now I understand most of it but only because I learned the dumbed down version first

I am in the same boat. I think a compromise would be a dumbed down version and a "pro" version that perhaps had all of the pins broken out. If a person wants to get 100% out of the chip for there project I think they would have to build their own board anyway. An example being the difference between developing a design using an Uno and using just the 328 for the final project.

Reading the LeafLabs forum, it seems there are serveral people making "mini" versions with the STM32 chips much like the Arduino Nano but, with the advantages of the Arm pin count and speed.

I think the next killer app for an Arduino like board will not be with the Due. Right now it is vapor. I know it is supposed to be released soon, but how mature will the libraries be? I could not wait as I have 2 projects pending.

One is a high speed fiber connection link at 5Mbps. The other is a biometrics app with TFT display and interface to a 3D environment on a PC. Both of these apps I am using the Uno32 because of price point, form factor, and they are available NOW. The libraries are not as mature as the Arduino 1.0 libs, but they get the job done.

I love the Arduino form factor. I am using Arduinos to create test signals for my Uno32 and for developing programming and test tools. I was really hoping to use the Due, but it is MIA. I just hope when the Due does come due, that it supports 5V tolerant pins.

So, for the next killer app, I am not waiting for the Due. I am using the Uno32.

In fairness the pic32 is in competition with the AVR32 which also supports 5 volt digital inputs, but for some reason the team decided to use this durn ARM thing which is in a entirely different family